


One Year and a Bit

by rainer76



Category: Ripper Street
Genre: Estrangement, First day back at work, Gen, Pre season one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-04
Updated: 2013-09-04
Packaged: 2017-12-25 14:46:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/954371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/rainer76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a weird little ficlet, pre season one, on the drifting viewpoints of loss</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Year and a Bit

**Author's Note:**

> My first fic for this show celebrated the men, seems fair to write a quick character study on the women - or rather the marriage between Edmund and Emily - I'm not a fan of character bashing, so fair warning, you won't find it here. Slash is next, promise

The winding Stream that runs along,

Conveys the distant headsman song.

The Violets bloom beneath thy feet,

For nature decks the calm retreat.

 

“The Linnet”, composed by James Hook 1746-1827

******

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Ed,” Abberline says, not unkindly.  “You’ve come back to us too soon.”

“No.  I’ve been cleared for duty by the surgeon Withurton.” 

Reid places both palms against the table and leans his weight forward until Abberline gestures for him to sit.  Cigarette smoke hangs low against the ceiling of the Brown Bear, the murmur of distant voices reaches them, carried over the piano tunes by the eddies and swells of sound.  “I would daresay, Whitechapel needs every able bodied policeman right now.”

“And Mrs. Reid?”  Abberline interrupts.  He strikes a match, a cheap cigar clamped between his teeth. “What does she say?”

“She would have her husband perform his duty.”

“Is that so?” 

His dress shirt feels stiff.  It scrapes against Reid’s collarbone, clamps tight against his throat; the vest and the coat remain a constriction, a conflagration against puckered skin, against sensation and nerve endings that make no sense.  It’s as if his body has been re-hardwired - smelted and doused - forged into alien-ness.  It takes everything in Reid’s self-control not to fidget.  His fingertip taps once against the tabletop in rebellion, he breathes in the smoke Aberline expels.  “In truth I would stay no longer in the house…the pervading silence offends me.”  There’s a roar in the background, the beginnings of a quarrel between two liver-pickled Bobbies, Reid flicks his gaze in the general direction, his diction clipped.  “I’ve no temperament for laying about at home.  I’m of more use working cases, Inspector.”

“Not if you can’t swing a belly club over your head you’re not.”

“I’m right-handed,” Reid points out, undeterred.  “And there are plods for that type of work.”

“So there are...so there are.” He looks tired: in the two months that have passed since the steam-launcher sank, Fred Abberline has aged dramatically.  He was always an imposing man, he stood well over six foot, but it’s as if his vitality has drained, leaving his face gray, eyes dimmed.  He taps the ash from his cigar, his voice a confiding rumble. “In my experience there are no fast guidelines to grief or the passage it travels.  I would ignore Withurton’s report and afford you and your wife more time if I could, but you’ve always been canny in your assumptions, Ed.  Truth is, I could use your help.”

Reid doesn’t allow himself to relax with the admission.  He had dressed this morning with painstaking slowness, until he was a picture of his former self, fit and able and not a _hint_ of weakness. When they were first married, Emily might have straightened the lines of his coat, smoothed the collar down, she might have helped dress him, playfully, lips finding skin before sealing it over with fabric, her fingers splayed low. 

When they were first married.

She doesn’t watch him dress now, her eyes averted from the ruin of his shoulder, where great stripes of flesh are melted like candle-wax from a brazier.  Reid, if he’s feeling hopeful, will say its propriety, or he would say she’s allowing him the dignity of dressing himself, where once her actions were playful they’re now a statement of support: it’s Emily affording her husband what privacy she can, as befits a modest wife. He can believe that when he’s hopeful.

But there is something inside of Reid that remains remote, that views the actions of other’s as a separate agency, and this part fears she no longer desires him – Emily’s isolation is in some parts grief – but perhaps it’s an allusion of disgust as well, _revulsion_ , a ghastly reminder of everything lost that day.  He had dressed himself that morning in clothes that catch against raw nerve-endings, and the only thing Reid knows with certainty, is that his wife – propriety or not - doesn’t _look_ at him anymore.  Instead, she looks toward God.

“There’s a Sergeant of mine by the name of Bennet Drake, have you heard of him?”

“Some.”  Older in appearance and aged anywhere between forty or fifty years, Reid can picture his face but it comes with little foreknowledge of Drake’s disposition.

“A good man, quick to take orders and not afraid to bloody his fists.  He was born and raised on the streets here, knows every nook and cranny in Whitechapel.  He’s yours.  Exclusively.”  Abberline falls silent as a bar wrench places two tumblers on the table, followed by a bottle of liquid gold and a quick curtsey.  Reid ignores the interruption entirely, barely glances at her, Abberline smiles, teeth covered by his lips.  “Thank you, girl. “

“Sir,” she says, and pockets the coin discreetly.

“Withurton said you had full range of motion returned to your left arm.  He’s also been spotted drinking heavily these last nights, purse heavy with coin, I’d wager.”  Reid raises one eyebrow in reply; he finishes half the glass in a single swallow, expression inscrutable.   Abberline snorts and motions at Reid’s shoulder.  “Breathe easy, for these are my orders: don’t tax it, man, I won’t have Mrs. Reid suffer any more ills than she already has.  Use Drake however is convenient but a word for the wise, Inspector; do your best not to rile the Sergeant’s temper.  Rumour has it, it’s a little untamed.”

“Noted, sir.” 

There’s raucous laughter in the background as one of the Bobbies topples over, shoved by his mate, there’s noise and sound and beneath that a vibrant beat of desperate life.  Abberline looks at him shrewdly.  “The offensive silence you spoke of earlier?  I understand there are _two_ parties living in that house, enough for at least one of them to make some clatter. “

“And there remains a spectre, too, that lies between us still.” 

She’s not dead, Reid thinks, and the mantra is like the call of a banshee, it pulls any hope of rest from him.  Matilda’s not dead, he _swears_ to it.  The shirt scrapes over his torso, the memory of heat like a flash fire  - it crushes his shoulder, molten and hot and seven kinds of hell - brackish water floods his mouth until he can’t tell one sensation from another, both agonies occupy the same space at the same time, until he’s drowning in it.  Ragged, Reid pushes the memory away.  He punches the words out viciously.  “This is a topic, Fred, you have no license to air.”

There’s an up-tic in Abberline’s cheek, neither a flinch nor a grimace; he rolls the tumbler over in his fingertips.  “My apologies for the offence.  As I said, there are no guidelines for grief or the direction it takes, I understand Mrs. Reid spends most of her time at the church, talking to God, for her sake, I hope he has the temperament to speak to her back.”

 

****

 

(((If they did talk, then Emily might have said something like this)))

 

They were happily married for seven years, they brought life into this world that would not be forgot - the bow of her lip and the childish curve of Matilda’s spine – but sometimes Emily needed to let the memory of her daughter run free, that if she had _her_ way, she would have her child’s bedroom door flung wide open, her belongings strewn, so Emily could touch the things she had touched, find a fleeting, tactile, connection.  She would find the whirlpool of Matilda’s thumbprint, turn the next chapter in her children's book, breathe in the last traces of her scent. Emily would take her time, keep the things that mattered, set the rest aside, it would be packed for the orphan's shelter.  If she had _her_ wishes, then the room would _not_ be sealed shut, every item kept in perfect position, angled just so, waiting for the moment they’re daughter walked through the entry.

At Edmund’s behest the room is a mausoleum to Matilda’s last day here, it remains as motionless as a bug trapped in amber, until Emily feels stifled every time she walks passed it, as if she’s buried six feet under, until in the end, all she wants is for it to be stripped.

Emily was raised to be a God-fearing woman and she married a husband who had no faith in God – with all the parallels and tangents that run between her and Edmund – it is that point that amuses her most.  She declares Matilda dead, knows it in her heart, and with the declaration Emily’s no longer held captive to inertia, no longer frozen in amber, she has the courage and the _tenacity_ to move on.   The girl was only five years of age, seventy-seven drowned and a hundred and seventy-one were saved, there were only five bodies that were never accounted for and her daughter was one of them, that's not an unreasonable assumption, it's mathematics, percentages - ultimately, it's the frail memory of her bones, the size of her.  She declares Matilda dead, and Emily mourns, bone-deep, as if her heart was torn asunder – if she had _her_ way, she would speak to Edmund of Matilda freely, let her memory live on, but he won’t hear of it, or entertain the notion.  He shuts her down at every attempt.  She married a man who had no faith in God – when she herself was a God-fearing woman, and maybe that’s the greatest humour of all - that Emily can’t survive on faith, ethereal and _unsupportable_ faith, or live her entire life on tenterhooks, it’s healthier to close the book on that particular chapter.  Edmund, who curls his lip at the church, whose disapproval washes clear through her when she walks out to Sunday Mass – has nothing _but_ faith – that out there somewhere, Matilda still lives.

It’s opposing ideologies.  If they did talk, then Emily might have said this:

That people mourn in different ways and at different lengths.  She loves her husband but she can’t stand touch him – to trace over the wounds Edmund carries -because all she sees in the end is Matilda, and without a body or the facts at hand, all Emily has is her imagination.  Was Matilda burnt as horribly as him?  Did the tides pull her under, weigh her clothes and her hair?  What degree of panic she felt, what terror, as the water closed over her head, seeped past her mouth, filled her gullet and her lungs?  Emily can’t look at the injuries Edmund suffered, not without imaging all the manners of death that might have befallen her, and sometimes, in wonder, she puzzles on how Edmund survived at all, fire and black water, all the elements of nature stacked against him.  One year, she thinks, isn’t long in the grand scheme of things, one year and a bit, and the space between them, the size and length of a little girl, might fade from horror into solace.  The greatest importance is always placed on men, on what men _want_ , on what they _feel,_ on what they think they _deserve._   Seven years of happy and loyal marriage, all she needs in return is the time to let the questions settle.   

Can you afford me that, she might ask, a year and a bit to work through my grief?

You don't touch me anymore, he might answer.

But they never talk.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This hasn't been beta-read, if you see errors, feel free to point them out, corrections will be made in haste *g*


End file.
